If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Griesbach's 2nd Edition

I have compiled Griesbach's Greek NT (2nd edition) for Bibleworks. This is my first attempt at doing some compiling for Bibleworks, so hopefully this will work, and if there are any things I have not done right, please let me know. A zip file is attached.

I have compiled Griesbach's Greek NT (2nd edition) for Bibleworks. This is my first attempt at doing some compiling for Bibleworks, so hopefully this will work, and if there are any things I have not done right, please let me know. A zip file is attached.

Thanks for sharing your hard work! Do you mind if we post the files on the unofficial BibleWorks blog?

Some criticisms

There have been some criticisms of my Griesbach compilation:
1. It does not respect Griesbach's policy on moveable nu (he often leaves it off when other texts leave it on).
2. It does not respect Griesbach's policy on capitalisation of proper nouns (he usually does not capitalise people's names)
3. It does not follow consistent policies on breathings and accents.
4. It does not use proper punctuation.

The reasons for most of these issues is that I used as my base text for compilation the Bibleworks TR text (STE), thinking that this would be the text (or something very similar) that Griesbach would have used as his 'base text',and therefore the variant readings in his critical apparatus would show deviations against STE and it would be easiest in my compiling to trace these differences. Now, not many people will be very familiar with the STE text or use it as one of their main texts for comparison in Bibleworks, but unfortunately, the Bibleworks STE text is not the best text in terms of some of these problems: for example, its punctuation is often non-existent or is patchy at best (see, for example, the limited punctuation in STE in Mat 1:2-3 or Mar 12:14-15), its accents on words vary (check out the way it changes its accents on the name David -is there a reason for these changes?) but also other times it is just erratic or worse.

Doing the Griesbach compilation took hundreds of hours over the past year, and I simply did not feel it was my mission in life to try to clean up all the problems in the STE text first. The STE text (I hope) faithfully reproduces the actual letters of Stephanus' text - and that was good enough for the text-critical purposes which I was interested in (textual critics usually ignore accentuation altogether in collation, etc, as few of our early manuscripts have accents). I do not have any interest in the issue of moveable nu. The idea of non-capitalisation of proper nouns holds no attraction for me either (I think most people would vote for capitals if they had a choice). The idea of reproducing Griesbach's text exactly seems silly (shall we reproduce all Griesbach's other typographical oddities, like its contractions of the letter-combinations of sigma-tau or omicron-upsilon or its kai abbreviation?). On the other hand, I did try to faithfully amend Griesbach's text to conform to what Griesbach's 2nd edition contained (accents, breathings, punctuation and all) in cases where I changed the STE text as a result of a textual variant.

Again, Griesbach sometimes has some strange breathings (and maybe accent) policies of his own (for example, he puts a rough breathing on each of the four instances of AUTWN in Rev. 9:21). Now, my understanding of AUTWN with a rough breathing is that this is another way of saying EAUTWN, and I have compiled the GRI text at this point exactly the way Griesbach reads it, but I doubt that Griesbach meant EAUTWN.

Ultimately, my reason for compiling Griesbach's text determined my approach. I did not compile GRI as a Reader's GNT, but instead, I compiled it as a textual comparison tool. I do not think that Griesbach's text is textually significant in and of itself (if it was, someone would have compiled it before me). He just gets too many big textual calls wrong to be a text anyone would use for reading the GNT. But Griesbach's text is significant because of the contrast he provides with so many other critical texts. His main principles mean, in my opinion, that he gets hundreds of minor textual decisions correct (because of his balanced approach to external evidence, and his nuanced transcriptional canons), where other critical texts have suffered 'death by a thousand small cuts'. So, my aim has been to get his text compiled, without worrying about all the para-textual stuff.

Matters of substance

Leaving aside the minor typographical and para-textual issues of the previous post, let us move on to matters of more substance. Griesbach's 2nd edition is a slightly different text to the variants reported in Bagster's Englishman's Greek New Testament (now reprinted by Baker Book House, I think) with its footnotes with the familiar EGLTTrAW. The G in these footnotes refers to Griesbach's small or manual edition of 1805, which differs in numerous small ways to the 2nd edition with its more copious critical apparatus (e.g. DAUID in the manual edition, DABID in the 2nd edition). Also, there are a number of reprints of Griesbach's 2nd edition. The version I used is sometimes called the Mackinlay and Martin reprint of 1809-10 - why Cuthell(?) is not also included in this title I do not know. Griesbach's 2nd edition was reprinted by different printers in different places at different times. The version I used for collation was the Nabu Press reprint (you can buy the two volumes on Book Depository), which is one of the least-perfect pieces of scanning in existence - it leaves out some pages, puts some pages out of order, and some pages are blurry. Still, it cost me a lot of money, and seeing I don't have an original edition of the real thing, I was stuck with it. Maybe the Cambridge Classics series scan is better quality, but I now own one costly scan of Griesbach's 2nd edition- I have no desire for another, nor would my wife be impressed with the idea of spending more money on two volumes that are going to be virtually the same. For missing pages, I was forced to use Bagster's footnotes.

Griesbach's 2nd edition has two critical apparatuses - a 'middle' margin of significant variants showing deviations from the TR and a lower margin with more trivial variants plus all the actual manuscript evidence. I used the 'middle' margin to make corrections to the STE to give me the GRI compilation (and Bagsters to fill in gaps due to missing pages in the scan/print). One thing that I worry about is that Griesbach maybe did not note all his differences from the TR in his 'middle' apparatus. Of some concern to me are cases where Griesbach may have occasionally added to the TR (he never seems to report omissions in his 'middle' apparatus). Maybe this is because the TR is the longest text of the NT by some distance, so there would not be awhole lot of cases of Griesbach adding to it, but there might be some cases.

Of course, I will also have made some mistakes in compilation. Virtually every text, printed or coded, contains errors, so I have no doubt mine will have its fair share. I have already discovered one mistake (not amending the spelling of Solomon in two or three verses - Griesbach drops the tau in SOLOMWNTA), and I am sure there will be other cases of errors that need to be corrected. If anyone using GRI finds any errors, please let me know and I will happily bring out a revised version after a while. If you are using the Bagsters/Baker GNT, bear in mind that the difference between its G and my GRI text might be due to differences between the different versions of Griesbach's text (manual and 2nd). If anyone has a better copy/reprint of Griesbach's edition than the Nabu Press reprint (it must however be the Mackinlay and Martin version of the 2nd Edition), that would be great for sorting out what the text actually reads at certain points in the NT.

Again, my main reason for compiling Griesbach's text was to get his text onto Bibleworks, and particularly to get an accurate idea of his textual proportions (at 139,623 words he is far longer than all the other critical texts and quite a bit shorter than the Byzantine text or the TR). Single letters errors (like the tau in Solomon) vex me, but what I want above all is an accurate word count and accurate reporting of his textual decisions, not so much (and here I apologise for disappointing some people) his accent, breathings or punctuation policies.

Thanks for the following posts. It's good to learn a bit more about what was behind the creation of this database that way we know what to expect and what not to expect from it. You have to know, of course, that once you wade into the field of textual criticism, there is bound to be criticism of your text. There are of course different reasons people might want to have access to such a text as you have created and some will be happy with it and some won't. That's just sort of how things go. I primarily wanted to know how you made it to so that I could put a hard reference behind the work. If you said your text was Griesbach's 2nd edition, I wanted to be able to use your text and know that it is the same thing as typing what is found in a hard book edition. Obviously that wasn't exactly your intention, so I couldn't use your text for that purpose. However, if someone wanted to know the general readings of Griesbach and was less concerned about some of the finer points that you mentioned, then your text would be just fine.

I hope you don't understand the criticisms as ungratefulness though. Your work is appreciated, it just needed to be understood more.

The zip file of the Griesbach text that Andrew made as well as an updated verse-mapping file (provided by Mark Eddy) are available on the BibleWorks blog at this link.

Thanks very much to Mark for putting together the VMF file. Again, there will be some minor differences between the VMF file and Griesbach's actual text. By minor differences, I do not mean that the wording of the GRI text is any different to Griesbach's 2nd edition, but rather that Griesbach starts or ends a verse a few words earlier or later than the STE text that I have used for a base text. If there is anyone for whom this is a significant research issue, I am happy to amend the GRI text to conform exactly to Griesbach's text - it will only take a few hours of work to tidy this up.

Griesbach's 2nd edition has two critical apparatuses - a 'middle' margin of significant variants showing deviations from the TR and a lower margin with more trivial variants plus all the actual manuscript evidence. I used the 'middle' margin to make corrections to the STE to give me the GRI compilation (and Bagsters to fill in gaps due to missing pages in the scan/print). One thing that I worry about is that Griesbach maybe did not note all his differences from the TR in his 'middle' apparatus. Of some concern to me are cases where Griesbach may have occasionally added to the TR (he never seems to report omissions in his 'middle' apparatus). Maybe this is because the TR is the longest text of the NT by some distance, so there would not be awhole lot of cases of Griesbach adding to it, but there might be some cases.